Job Rotation

This type of training involves the movement of trainee from one job to another. It helps him to have a broad understanding of how the organisation functions. The reason of job rotation is to provide trainees with a big organisational perspective and a better understanding of different functional areas as well as a better sense of their own career objectives and interests. Apart from relieving boredom, job rotation permits trainees to create rapport with a broad range of individuals within the organisation, facilitating future cooperation amongst departments. The cross-trained personnel offer a huge amount of flexibility for organisations while transfers, promotions or replacements become inevitable. Job rotation can pose many problems, especially while the trainees are rolled on many jobs at frequent intervals. In such kind of case, usually trainees do not stay long sufficient in any single phase of the operation to build up a high degree of expertise. For slow learners, there is small room to integrate resources correctly. Trainees may become confused while they are exposed to rotating managers, having contrasting styles of operation. Today's manager's commands can be replaced by another set from another manager! Furthermore, job rotation may be quite expensive. A substantial amount of managerial time is lost while trainees change positions, because they have to be acquainted with different kind of people and techniques in each of the department. Development costs may go up and productivity is dropped by moving a trainee into a new position while his efficiency levels start to develop at the prior job. Inexperienced trainees can fail to handle new tasks in an efficient means. Intelligent and aggressive trainees, on the offer hand, may discover the system to be in detail boring as they continue to perform more or less same type of jobs without any stretch, challenge and pull. To get the best results from system, it should be tailored to the interests, needs and capabilities of the particular trainee, and not be a standard sequence that all trainees undergo. Box 6 presents the demerits and merits of job rotation:

Box : Job Rotation: Merits and Demerits